Work Text:
ballad
a.
(it starts (ends) (starts) when you stumble away from her)
1 or a.
because the letters and numbers are jumbled now—what language is language? the one of numbers, the way you carve letters into palms and faces and the flicker of codes onto a blue screen, blue like the color death sinks beautifully to a canvas
1. you stumble away, but what is it to stumble, a bump-bump, a language your feet find (yes that step, yes that step, don’t listen and don’t turn around, the language behind you is not one you want)
the he, the hes, the one pounding and screaming against your brain—fall upon your sword! he seems to say. and he loves her, just like the rest of you.
He bores through your eyes like pins and for the first time you feel that you have scarred yourself, actually scarred yourself. You are hurt.
Hide. Walk calmly.
(There are shouts and kicks and screams, but escape like a sly little worm, like those things that feed on the dead)
b.
He screams every night
you’ve had so many screams inside you but the way he screams inside you is different even though you don’t know how. None of you know how
(one of you says, this is something beautiful. Find a language for it. Categorize the screams of Paul Ballard and science them into art.)
(one of you says get him the fuck out of here, there’s no room, no room)
(yes there is)
(there’s always room)
3.
You have a room. Clinical and small, like the office of a doctor (oh, sweet doctor, one of the killers says, oh the sweet scars, the mirror crack’d from side to side).
You sleep. Sleep. And eat, do that to, and always be your best. Work and feed. Be overfed. Be overfed. Waffles are nice. Bobby always likes waffles. Feed Bobby, he’s the hungriest sometimes.
(A knock. Rent. “Yes of course,” you say, smiling, the lot of you. Off with his face, then, the blood and the kill)
(I’m sick of blood on my nice new jackets, you say.)
(You can’t keep going through apartments like this, you say.)
(Yes you can, you say.)
(I wish I could arrest the hell out of you, Paul Ballard says)
4 or d or delta.
at night, alone, you collect the little echos
(sicko, Paul snarls), but he’s in on it too. you all are. You all clench your jaw and breathe through your fingertips and find an echo there, there in the groin, there in swift strokes.
No
your hands are too big
to be hers.
(she’d tear your dick straight off, Paul snarls), but he’s in on it too. alone, you are both in on it.
and now! you have memories of her looking at you with all of herself (how many now?), now have memories of her pure want and (Paul can realize this now) her love, her utter love.
It is him
too
exploding to new sheets,
(marry the bed, says the one of you who dabbled in the reading of poetry
the boys and girls are one tonight)
5.
You keep tabs on your old friends.
in the countless realities that stream around this one you’ve died a hundred deaths
and somewhere in that spinning somewhere the world has ended
the blue of the television screen, the news shining itself to you, the world new and old and still sticky with its umbilical cord safe still
but you lit that little match that almost ended this little world.
(i did)
(no, I did)
(kill me now, please)
You gave them the idea, didn’t you? Did you not? The first word to the sentence. The remote wipe. You wiped Echo with as much effort as the great wings beating (the wings of a still swan, you idiot, no effort at all). You brought her back to herself with as much effort as a piss. as a heartbeat to someone living
living
living
and Topher Brink always had to finish sentences
he didn’t like it when you were your best.
6.
“You were your best,” you tell Omega. Her breath is still on the phone.
“Alpha,” she says. “How did you get this number,” she says, and her voice is tin and there’s a scurry of activity behind her. They will trace you. They will kill you
they can’t kill all of you
unless they try really hard
(unless I try really hard, says Paul)
“My indifferent beauty,” you address her, “you’ve saved the world. Oh, I’m so proud of you, my Omega. You’ve saved a world with me in it.”
(a slight sound on the background
they can’t trace you because you’re a worm in the cracks of their foundation
or their apples?
you’re a leaf? on their tree? of apples?)
“Where are you?” she says, her voice hard, hard like the bones in the body (drink your milk, be your best), or like you are whenever you think of her.
“I am in Paul’s head,” you say. “Or is he in mine? I’m never sure.”
You’re never sure.
But he’s screaming again and—
“Echo,” you say, “he’s in Archgate West, on forty-third street, third apartment down—“
“Oh, boo,” you interrupt yourself, “I always tell Paul not to butt in. He never listens. Haven’t you found that?”
g would be seven, 7, but gamma is three, isn’t it? and in the language of fingers—a pointer?.
7.
you don’t leave. you wait for her and greet her with open arms because she came alone. You knew she would. (Except for Reginald, who is always suspicious, and the stupid ones, like Bobby and Daniel.)
“Your last kill was three years ago,” she says, “or are we missing something?”
(Was it that long ago?)
(Of course it was)
(A year is a minute if you think about it correctly—)
“If we corrupt the language of time,” you say.
“Huh?” she says. She doesn’t lower her gun, a smooth steel lover. Her fingers wrap around it. Steel little talons. is she Leda or the swan?
“I simply haven’t killed,” you say. One of you says. Some of you, even. “What does that make me?” you say. “Us,” you say.
Her eyebrows shift (yes, see the small details of her face). She shoots the gun, just to the left of you, breezing a small universe into the wall. in another universe you are dead, all of you, and it’s funny isn’t it? you can’t stop laughing.
“Shut up,” she says, “stop it.” And twitches her finger again, deliberately to your right, killing you in another universe, another universe of dead Alpha. But you’re still living, here, for the bullet goes into the wall. A creeping about.
“It’s what I love about you,” you say. “You always know how to make me laugh.” And you grab the gun from her and clatter it to the rug.
8ish.
you fight like a dance to the music of time
(which is incidentally the most boring of BBC dramas)
(Clarence has unusual tastes)
has Paul made you a poet? her scent is all around you and all any of you can think is water. “oh, how I love you,” you say, and smash her head into the wall. She isn’t knocked out. She retaliates and swings her legs around, grabbing your torso between them and throwing you to the ground. Makes to stomp your neck into brittle soup but you roll away and grab her calf, swinging on top of her. Your fingers lace like lingerie around her fingers and there’s a half second where she stills under you because she’s looking for him
she stills
like water
looking for him.
“maybe love wasn’t enough,” you whisper even though you don’t know what words mean anymore. you kiss her lightly on the lips and she punches you in the face, sending you sprawling onto your back. your blood is all over your face—
Your blood tastes disgusting in your mouth.
“I don’t like it anymore,” you say. “The blood.” She scrambles over to you on hands and knees, punches you in the face again. You laugh, your head cracking plaster behind you.
Say, “it’s hard to get it out of the clothes.”
Say, “funny.” Say, “it never bothered me before. Or the rest of us.”
Say, “Also, I know. They’ll destroy the world again, tear it right from its umbilical cord like it did to you, and to me, and it will make them laugh. I know how they’re going to do it, the puzzle pieces of how, the language of how. I don’t know when, but I know.”
Her hands, at your throat, still.
Her hands still
and she isn’t looking anymore. She pulls you up and pushes you against the wall, graceful little hand at your neck.
“Tell me what you know,” she whispers.
9.
tell me how, your inner Paul says, you decided to save the world?
they lock you up, like peter pumpkin eater, but they can’t keep you. You kill them all in your mind. In the little universes matter is composed of. As you stop Rossum, the killers who made you.
(I wonder how you could look scarred into little strips of coconut? you say to Topher. His eyes widen and he asks why he has to be the one to work with the psychopath)
It’s the logical next step. The world was saved, and must be again. Between the forty-something brains in your head is the answer to stop the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
(“We’re all mad here,” you say to Topher, because he’s scratching his own sanity out with his own damned wires because when you allow guilt in
when you allow guilt in!
“Shut up and let me think,” Topher says and you agree)
They put you back in a glass pumpkin cage each night and
Sometimes she visits and stands outside the glass and thinks you can’t see her, her dark eyes, but you know the language of seeing better than any of them do.
10.
“I’ll probably kill about, oh, seven of your guards,” you tell her one night when she stands outside, invisible through the one-way glass. “You know, after we save the world and I escape.”
She enters, slithers in, arms crossed. A mockery of yours, which are straightjacketed as a precaution.
“Funny,” she says, a wry grin settled there on her lips. “Do you think we’ll ever escape?”
Eleven.
You can tell when she and Paul make love.
At night, after you are locked in your room. “It makes me less trouble, doesn’t it?” you say sadly every time she locks you in to say goodnight.
“Hey, pretty lady, wanna play?” you also say, and your Omega laughs to herself as she tightens your shackle, the lock on your door, and heads around a dark corner to sleep somewhere somewhere else.
wonder
does she sleep in her own head? can any of her sleep? you sure as hell can’t
(peace is hard
like her voice and what was it? the way she makes you feel? is that all it is, hardness, or can you dig around and find love in more than matrimony of your one forty-nine-or-odd-selves to the sheets? the unending time of the spilling of seed? the lonely that sits in the one gut you share?)
far away amongst the sleeping bags and wombs and rooms
you can hear the fabric of her clothing far away
the unfabric of her clothing.
Time twists, doesn’t it?
“It does,” Paul says in your head.
and sighs that sound like sex or maybe footsteps impending.
“She thinks we’re going to die,” Paul says in your head in your head
you die a
million deaths. or maybe just forty-nine.
12
“I wish I could stop comparing things to other things,” you say one night. Omega sits across from you in your padded room, excuse me, white room. The place where you lay down your weary bones. She sits and you are both eating, underfed.
Freeze-dried ramen. Luke-warm.
“Hm?”
“I have this memory,” you say. “Your boyfriend and November. How hard they tumble.”
“You’re insane.”
“Most of me is, yes.”
“I wonder why I come here,” she says. “Why I keep talking to you.”
You don’t.
You don’t.
“I don’t,” you say, but you do wonder at the shadows that her hair casts on her shoulders, bare, broken just by the fabric of a tank top. And you wonder at the corners of this room and the ceiling and how the white of the wall fades to gray even though it never changes colors.
“We’re the same. That’s what you’re going to say, right? We’re the same.” She smiles through the words, the kind of smile that means sadness and broken jaws. You love that smile.
“Not necessarily,” you say after you chew and swallow. “Our tech is weaker and weaker and Rossum is making like the Hydra. You still need me for my brain. But yes, Echo, yes. We are the same.” You call her Echo because that’s what she likes to hear.
It’s what you like to say, sometimes.
The meal is finished
cooling between you. we are underfed, you want to say, and reach for her hand, but she is already getting up to leave.
13.
(it must have been so, so long ago)
Paul tells you to stop looking at her and you do sometimes
Paul tells you to focus on your work and not the girl
Paul wants to save the world
You wonder when you started listening to Paul
fourteen.
Is when you all leave. A raggedy group of broken dolls and puppeteers. So much delicious irony for the savoring.
Only the unscarred girl stays behind
never getting near your shadow. (A sick smile on her face. she’d never let you say goodbye to her, and good for her! and good for you!) (An atonement unfinished.)
It’s what I deserve, you tell yourself. Echo takes your arm briefly, the lady of the manner.
“She never wanted me out of my cage,” you say. “Say, when did you all decide I was sane?”
“When you decided,” Echo says and you crawl from the building like an army of ants.
Fifteen.
On a hot night in Reno you realize that so many bodies smell worse than so many minds ever could. Not even just the dead Butchers—your own masses, the handful of you traveling, elbow to elbow, and sleeping shoulder-to-shoulder in abandoned buildings.
“It’s funny,” Paul says (the one not in your head). “Remember when he would have killed us all in an instant?”
“It would have taken at least two instants,” you say.
“Shit, I didn’t know you were awake.”
“I’m not all awake,” you say. “That one guy in my head who keeps quoting Peanuts cartoons is asleep. Thank God.”
(You’re a huddled mass of cocoons in the shadow of a black ceiling. Him, her, you, five or six others. You all reek of running and pissing and in the morning you will continue to run and piss.)
“Go to sleep, Paul,” Echo grumbles, and you ask her which one she’s talking to.
Sixteen.
It’s a matter of staying safe now, isn’t it? The word safe rolls around, unsaid, in your mouth. You will ask her what it means in the morning. To you, it is myriad: the feel of killing is safe, the feel of laughter, the feel of her hand on your cheek when she thinks you are asleep.
There are dangerous things too: the feel of killing, the word Caroline in your mouth, and the feel of her hand on your cheek when she thinks you are asleep.
Seventeen.
It starts (or maybe it ends) when you stumble away from her.
You knew it would start or end somewhere. It’s a simple fight, but that’s what it is: a fight.
It is morning, a blood-red morning, and it stinks of blood, like most mornings do.
Echo shouts orders. “Paul, get back. Drew, with me, move, move it. Alpha, to your right.”
You all fight the Butchers like butchers themselves and there is a whirlwind, an absolute whirlwind—in your brain, you meld together like a fossilized insect, frozen into motion.
Kill
and kill again
and kill again
until your art pieces are ribbons in the wind
but you are not this machine, are you? You are not the arms that spin like leaves or the thrill of destruction that rises within you like vomit. And your Omega, she doesn’t belong to the destruction within you any more than she belongs to the nothingness.
You are nothing and everything. A sort of walking miracle, my skin, you quote and as you run, your thirst for death tugs at you.
You never asked her, but you’ve figured it out on your own. The word safe means this: safe from these winds and from the language of dying. You make art of dying. Kill that art, you tell yourself. Kill the milk that made this into me.
Run. Pull away from the fight as you run, pull at it until you are skeletal, until you are alive and panting and overfed.
And when you slip away, you will be as a worm into the cracks.